Sunday, December 11, 2016

Last Call For A "New Direction"

It
was a blunt, plain-spoken set of senators who gathered last Monday at
the Washington home of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota,
dining on Chinese food as they vented frustration about the missteps of
the Democratic Party.

To
this decidedly centrist group, the 2016 election was nothing short of a
fiasco: final proof that its national party had grown indifferent to
the rural, more conservative areas represented by Democrats like Joe
Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of
Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, who attended the dinner. All face
difficult re-election races in 2018.

The party, these senators
said, had grown overly fixated on cultural issues with limited appeal to
the heartland. They criticized Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan,
“Stronger Together,” as flat and opaque, according to multiple people
present at the dinner, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Most
of all, they lamented, Democrats had simply failed to offer a clarion
message about the economy with appeal to all 50 states.

“Why
did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?” Mr.
Manchin said in an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner
conversation.

Moderate Democrats are not alone in their sense of
urgency about honing a new economic message. After a stinging loss to
Donald J. Trump, liberals in the party are also trying to figure out how
to tap into the populist unrest that convulsed both parties in 2016.
Only by making pocketbook issues the central focus, they say, can
Democrats recover in the 2018 midterm elections and unseat Mr. Trump in
2020.

“We need to double down and double down again on the
importance of building an economy not just for those at the top, but for
everyone,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a
high-profile progressive who is seen as a leading potential opponent for
Mr. Trump.

This pocketbook-centered approach offers an added
benefit in the minds of Democratic strategists: It papers over the
party’s differences on how much to focus on cultural issues.

There
is little appetite among most Democrats to substantively revise their
stances on issues like abortion, gay rights, gun control and
immigration, where trends on the national level continue to favor the
party. By constructing a platform focused on an overarching theme of
economic fairness, Democrats are hoping to avoid yoking their candidates
to a more divisive agenda that could sink them in states like North
Dakota and West Virginia, which are crucial to control of the Senate.This
is markedly different from the approach that party leaders have taken
over the last eight years, when President Obama defined the party from
top to bottom with his personality and policies. Instead, Democrats
intend to focus on a sparer agenda of bread-and-butter priorities that
can win support from both liberal and moderate officeholders — and
appeal to voters just as much in red states as along the two coasts.

It's abortion,
gay rights, gun control and immigration that Democrats will now be
running away from. Most importantly it's issues of race that will be
ignored. Democrats will simply pretend Obama never happened.

Voters of color will not. If we're going to go with a combination of Bernie "It's always about class" whitewashing and Centrist Dem triangulation, the Obama coalition will disintegrate for good and the GOP will rule this nation for a generation. If we even last that long.

Good luck, Dems. Good luck chasing the white vote and taking the black, Hispanic, and Asian vote for granted.

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With Republicans controlling the House and Senate and the Trump Regime now in charge of the Executive, there's still a crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.

Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.

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